


CSI: Someone Made a Mess of Downtown Miami

by chaosmanor



Category: The Losers (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Cleaning up after themselves, Crime Fighting, Gen, Gore, Splatter, Stealth Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-14
Updated: 2012-01-14
Packaged: 2017-10-29 12:22:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/319845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaosmanor/pseuds/chaosmanor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After hostilities erupt between a private security force and a Black Ops team in downtown Miami, Lieutenant Clay and his team of talented CSIs pick through the wreckage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	CSI: Someone Made a Mess of Downtown Miami

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tygermama](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tygermama/gifts).



The wreckage crunched under Clay's heels, and he let out a slow breath and pushed his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose. Roque, from Homicide, gestured to Clay from beside a wrecked vehicle.

"What have you got for me, Sergeant Roque?" he asked, turning his head and scanning the crime scene blasted across the downtown intersection. 

"Lieutenant," Roque said, looking up from the body he was crouched over, and around the shattered remains of the Miami street. "Something happened, something big. Rescue are sorting out the wrecks, and my people are securing the perimeter. Looks like all the survivors have picked up their guns and taken off, just leaving the deceased."

Clay looked up, into the shimmering heat of a Miami morning. "I don't like it when people start wars in my city."

"Neither do I," Roque said.

Aisha, the day-shift medical examiner, picked her way through the glass and twisted car panels, peeling off her latex gloves.

"Clay," she said, pocketing the used gloves and pulling on a new pair. "We've got concussive injury traumas and one burns. It's a clean job, no bystanders, only someone's private security force. The MDPD escort are unharmed, if a little traumatized."

"Yeah, no one told the Miami-Dade PD this off-duty private security escort job was high risk. They're annoyed. What about this one?" Roque asked gesturing down at the wreck they were standing beside and the body inside.

Aisha squatted down, tiny in her blue disposable scrubs beside the bulk of Roque in his suit and the burned-out van behind them.

"Same security force judging by the green fatigues," Aisha said, and Clay crouched down too, to inspect the uniform of the dead man. "Lots of pooled blood, so I'm guessing exsanguination. I can't tell you whether it's gunshot or trauma until after PM. Could be a bit of both; this was a messy firefight."

"Were they fighting each other?" Roque asked Clay. "Or someone else?"

"I'll let you know, once my team have worked that out," Clay said, looking over at the hummer that had just parked at the edge of the crime scene. "I'll let you know."

Pooch, Jensen and Cougar swung out of the hummer, field kits in their hands and Nikons around their necks, and Clay walked through the debris to meet them.

"Whoa," Pooch said. "Who blew up Miami?"

"You tell me," Clay said. "Cougar, you're on Trace. Pooch, Ballistics and Vehicles. And Jensen, overalls of the scene, then find me all of the surveillance and cell phone footage you can."

"Sure, C," Jensen said. "We got your back. That's a cannon on the back of that Hummer pick-up. Someone has been spraying a fucking cannon around the streets. Really, people? Check your cannons at the border."

Clay stepped sideways, because Jensen was swinging his Nikon pretty wildly, and Clay had copped a black eye from one of Jensen's more extreme crime scene exertions before. Clay suspected that secretly, Jensen's spectacles had safety lenses in them.

"The Pooch will do his job," Pooch said earnestly. 

Cougar shrugged and settled his non-regulation cowboy hat on his head more securely.

"We've got two hours, tops, before the men from the Company or Homeland Security turn up, take over and start denying things," Clay said. "Go."

His team scattered, kits in their hands. Clay pulled on latex gloves, and settled his own camera around his neck.

He was taking shots for Aisha as she pulled pieces of someone out of an exploded vehicle, when Roque loomed over the pair of them and the pile of dead bits on the plastic sheet.

"Been interviewing witnesses," Roque said, when Clay glanced up from photographing tattoos on an arm. "Explosions, tear gas, confusion, then a police chopper swoops in and evacuates the van at the center of the convoy."

Aisha dropped a hunk of wet stuff on to the plastic sheet, and said, "When you say chopper, you mean helicopter, not machete, right?"

"Helicopter," Roque said, sounding annoyed. Clay suspected he was having a bad day. "Apparently it collided with the Dunkin' Donuts sign on the way out."

"How does a helicopter evacuate a van?" Aisha asked. "Just so I can stop trying to figure it out and go back to collecting burned bits…"

"Fucking big magnet," Clay said, looking up at the Dunkin' Donut sign across the plaza, which was missing a third of the donut. "I'll get Jensen to check that sign for Trace."

"Thought he was your cyber-crimes person," Roque said.

"Data, giant sprinkles--don't make any difference to Jensen. He'll just pick through it all, ramble incoherently, and tell us who made the mess," Clay said.

When Aisha had zipped up the body bag, Clay went to find his team. Cougar was closest, crouched down beside a hot dog vendor's cart, kit open on the sidewalk.

"That's a hot dog cart," Clay said, just in case Cougar hadn't noticed.

"Renegade dog seller," Cougar said. "State of Florida requires all mobile food vendors to wear disposable gloves while dispensing food. This vendor? Did not."

Cougar peeled off another fingerprint lift and labelled the backing card carefully.

"Sure?" Clay asked.

"I checked, and some angry customer rang the State Health complaint line three minutes before the shooting started," Cougar said. "Didn't want to have diarrhea as well as mustard with her tasty, tasty snack."

"Angry customers win," Clay said, nodding approvingly at Cougar and looking into the open containers on the cart. "Those dogs do smell good…"

"Ask Aisha about the oral/fecal transmission route before you dine," Cougar said absently. "I'm sure she'll encourage you to eat the dogs."

"What's this?" Clay asked, peering into the bun storage compartment, under the cart.

Cougar crawled sideways and looked into the compartment, beside Clay.

"Scratches on the steel sides? Scrapes?" Clay asked, angling his flashlight to highlight the marks on the metal. "They must have been some mean hotdog buns." 

Cougar huffed slightly, and shone his flashlight into the compartment as well. "See?" he said, pointing at the pattern of indentations on the top of the remaining buns. "Looks like a crossbow was stored here."

"Since when do hot dog vendors arm themselves with crossbows?" Clay asked, standing up and pocketing his flashlight. "Photos and casts of the indentations, please."

Cougar tipped his hat at Clay, leaving a smudge of fingerprint dust on the brim.

Clay changed his gloves and went to check on Pooch, who was sprawled across the asphalt, digging at the road surface with pliers.

"Got something?" Clay asked.

"Pass me the impact driver, C?" Pooch said, without looking up from what he was doing.

Clay flipped through the full toolkit from the Hummer, and handed Pooch the manual impact driver and a hammer, handles first.

A few short bangs into the bitumen, and Pooch made a happy noise. "Because he's that good," Pooch said, under his breath and reaching for his camera.

Clay held out an evidence bag, and Pooch dropped in a twisted piece of wiring and metal.

"Made stuff blow up?" Clay asked.

"Yep," Pooch said, rolling on to his back, then sitting up to collect his gear. "Some kind of explosive projectile, with a detonator and wireless receiver. People make them, we find the people. It's a good system."

Pooch moved on to digging bullets out of parked cars, and Clay found Jensen at the back of the Hummer, with a laptop and a pile of confiscated cell phones.

"The Youtube generation," Jensen said. "So invested in citizen journalism, endlessly chasing hits on their page counters they'll video anything. Bless them, and their fame hungry hearts."

"Does this mean you have found something?" Clay asked, leaning over Jensen's shoulder to see the laptop screen, where a chopper with a van underneath it was swinging wildly between the downtown buildings.

"Where's Pooch, and his obsession with machines that drive, float, dive and fly?" Jensen said. "He would know. That chopper, the one on the screen, the one that is tossing the van at the Dunkin' Donut sign, is a bastardised Eurocopter AS332C Super Puma. The paint job is good, and it has a legitimately stolen tail number, but it is undeniably not a MDPD chopper."

"Fake chopper means a jacked van, with extra sprinkles," Clay said. "Anything else?"

"I know what kind of getaway vehicle the ground crew that jacked the van used," Jensen said, tapping at the laptop and changing the image. "A decrepit yellow Pinto."

Clay blinked, and shook his head at the blurry cell phone image of a dirty, dented old Pinto with two men standing beside it, weapons in their hands.

"Can you clean that up?" Clay asked.

"The image? Or the car?" 

"Get some ID on the guys with guns," Clay said. "You can wash the car as well, if we ever find it."

Clay walked over to Sergeant Roque, who was supervising the MDPD team collecting witness statements from the bystanders. 

"We got Company," Roque said to Clay in an undertone, angling his head at the anonymous black Ford pulling up behind Clay's team Hummer.

"Fuck," Clay. "We're nowhere near done."

An AT&T van pulled up beside the Ford, and Clay groaned. "There goes our evidence."

The Company men strolled under the police crime scene tape, holding out their IDs.

"Who's in charge?" a blandly middle-aged man incongruously wearing one glove asked.

"That's us," Sergeant Roque said. "Sergeant Roque, MDPD Homicide, and Lieutenant Clay, MDPD Crime Lab."

"National security," the bland man said, his voice slimy. "We'll be taking over. Please release the scene and the evidence to us."

Roque and Clay exchanged a glance, and Roque gave a minute shrug.

"We'll let our people know," Clay said.

Two minutes later, Clay was cross-checking the labelling of Pooch's ballistics evidence with Pooch and a Company drone. Shouting, sharp and close, made the three of them look up.

Aisha, the smallest, meanest Medical Examiner Clay had ever tried to work with, was holding on tightly to on end of a body bag, while a man in army scrubs pulled on the other end.

"You have to hand over the remains!" the man shouted.

"…your mother!" Aisha shouted. "I hope you get acariasis worms! This is my dead body!"

A Company man watching freed his weapon from its holster, and Pooch said, "Uh oh," beside Clay.

Clay turned to the Company drone on the other side of him, and said, "Fifty for our ME to whip your ME's ass."

The Company man said, "Deal. He's ex-Marine."

"Yeah, but ours is evil," Clay said. 

Aisha swung a leg out, low and wide, and stuck a booted foot into the Company ME's gut without loosening her grip on the body bag and corpse.

The Company ME yanked on the body bag, pulling Aisha closer, and chopped at her face and neck with his free hand.

"See?" the Company man said, beside Clay, and Clay chuckled as the Company ME went down suddenly, dropping the body bag with a messy sound and clutching his leg.

Over the sound of his blubbering, Clay said, "Fifty," to the Company man.

"Did she shoot him?" the Company man asked disbelievingly. "Why aren't you arresting her?"

"We made her stop shooting people," Clay said. "For her own good. You know, MEs, they carry probe thermometers sharp enough to pierce cadaver livers. Skewering a Federal Government agent in the thigh looks like a workplace accident to me. Now, about that fifty?"

The Company ME writhed on the ground until Aisha planted a boot on his leg and yanked something out, then holstered it back in her scrub pocket. Company goons guided her away, hands on their weapons while Company personnel bustled around, picking up their ME and lifting the body bag onto a gurney without actually touching Aisha or turning their backs to her.

The agent beside Clay sighed and took out his wallet to retrieve bills for Clay. "That was dirty fighting," he complained.

Clay smiled to himself. Aisha was a special kind of person, the sort you never wanted to be trapped in an elevator with, for instance. Only a fucking fool would try and arrest her, or take a dead body off her.

* * *

Clay's team regrouped back at the lab, with Sergeant Roque and an adrenalin-pumped Dr. Aisha Al-Fahid sitting in on the meeting.

"What did we find out, before we lost control of the scene?" Clay asked the room, handing the marker pen to Roque, who stood at the board.

"It was a military job," Roque said. "Tactically, very well put together by a small crew for maximum effect. Sure the outcome was splashy, but it was confined, and didn't result in a hostage situation."

Aisha said, "No bystanders or hired MDPD were injured. The only fatalities were the paramilitary operatives in dark green, unless the ambushing side took their dead away with them, but I didn't find any excess parts or blood pools. The deaths were all combat deaths. As localised outbreaks of armed violence go, I approve. The gangs could learn a lot from these people."

"Pooch?" Clay asked, as Roque scribbled notes on the board. "Did you make any sense of the evidence you collected in the time you had?"

"That thing I dug out of the road was more than just a fancy incendiary device with a remote," Pooch said. "It had a GPS tracker in it as well. Nice piece of tech. Sophisticated. Military, Special Forces or Black Ops in origin."

"Cougar?" Clay asked. 

Cougar shifted in his seat, rubbing his lips together, then mumbled, "Kept prints back from the hot dog cart. Got Jensen to jack me into the Company system, and ran them. Belong to a dead man."

"Any particular dead man?" Roque asked.

"Dead man amongst dead men," Cougar said. "All died in Bolivia doing shit."

"Funky shit," Jensen said. "Which doesn't explain how they could turn up here in Miami in a Eurocopter Super Puma painted up like an MDPD chopper, and fucking fly off with someone else's van. Class, pure class."

"Planning a career change?" Clay asked. "Because if you apply for leave without pay so you can go join these dead men, I'm not approving it. The lab can't spare you."

"The yellow Pinto, maybe not so classy," Jensen said. "Though possibly they thought that it would be the ultimate disguise, a car so hideous and pathetic that no one would expect dead Special Ops types to be starting a war in downtown Miami from it and a hot dog cart."

"What was in the van?" Roque asked. "Do we know?"

The meeting room was silent, until Clay said, "Well, we could steal it back off them, then we'd find out."

Aisha hitched her eyebrow piercing higher and crossed her arms. Roque was silent and still while he stared at his notes on the whiteboard, like a mountain thinking. Cougar got the spaced-out look that meant he was probably having a PTSD episode. Jensen's fingers twitched on the tabletop, looking for a keyboard.

Pooch said, "I'm a married man with a mortgage. Don't make those kinds of jokes, C."

Everyone breathed out, and the tension melted into laughter and shoulder rolling.

"So, one crew of Special Forces/Black Ops types ambushed another crew of private paramilitary types," Clay said. "The only people that died were inside the job. The only property stolen, exploded or trashed was owned by the crews, and some unfortunate bystanders who now need their cars panel-beaten. On the whole, I don't think we were the losers this time."

* * *

In the locker room at the end of the shift, while Clay was changing into jeans and T-shirt, Jensen sat on the bench and looked around the room.

"We could go after them," Jensen said, his voice low. "If you wanted to. I reckon I could find them, then you and I could take them out."

Clay tucked his T-shirt in, and said, "Are you fucking crazy? They stole the van off a crew armed with a fucking cannon? I'm not going in armed only with a Beretta 92FS and a geek."

Jensen waited, and Clay added, "Also, we're cops, we don't do that. Remember?"

Jensen grinned. "I love that your concern is that you're under-powered, not unauthorized. We're going to the bar now. You coming? A hangover will make the Petunia's game so much more fun."

"Hell, yes," Clay said. "Did you invite Aisha?"

Jensen looked suspiciously innocent. "No?"

Clay shook his head. Aisha, beer, the end of a tough working day, all in a confined space with the general public? This was not going to end well.

"Okay, but someone else has to try and arrest her this time," Clay said. "Let's go drink to the Company, Special Ops teams, and our jobs."

"You are coming to the Petunia's game tomorrow?" Jensen asked, slamming his locker door shut.

"Do I have a choice?" Clay asked, checking he had his knife in his boot and his off-duty gun in his hip holster. "Realistically?"

"No," Jensen said. "But my sister has some hot friends. I promise I've checked all of their criminal records this time." 

"They better be hot," Clay said, pulling his jacket. "I'm not losing money on a kid's soccer game without some serious payoff."

Cougar looked into the locker room, and made a hand gesture that could mean, 'dying of thirst', or, 'I'm going to cut you both.'

"Let's go," Jensen said. "MDPD's finest need beer."

Cougar smiled, as much as he ever did, and Pooch called out from the hallway, "What is taking you losers so long? Roque is dehydrated here, or so he says."

Roque's rumble wasn't intelligible, but Pooch squeaked, and added, "Sure, I'm driving to the bar, but you're all getting yourselves home."

Clay walked out into the hallway, Jensen behind him. Cougar, Roque and Pooch were shoving each other around in the hall, and Aisha was waiting beside the elevator, finger jammed on the call button.

"Beer!" Aisha called out. "Focus, people, focus!"

Clay slapped Pooch on the back, and followed his team down the hallway to the elevator. He really, seriously, hoped the elevator didn't break down this time, not with all of them in it. Not again…


End file.
